Why I'm Videoing My Dad

A big change comes over both of us when I turn on the camera. He may be 99 10/12, but he knows a camera when he sees one and he knows a little light on the front as well. He makes an effort to remember. Nuances we haven't heard in a while come out.
This whole "project" makes a difference in me. When I was little, my mom used to threaten to charge Dad for "old time stories." He was allowed one a day and then he'd have to pay each listener five cents for each story over that he told. While this may have slowed him down, it never stopped him, and I nor anyone else in the family ever realise a penny out of him for all the stories we had to listen to.
We used to tell people never to mention wine or milk products because the simple question, "Say, Bill, what kind of cheese do you like?" inevitably ended in a long, drawn-out monologue about "keows," butter, and the making of cheese. The same thing with wine. Dad was raised during Prohibition by non-drinkers so naturally he learned to make his own. He talked about using a hydrometer to make a reasonable facsimile of gin. There's a college education for you! None of this willy-nilly bathtub gin! One of my earliest botany lessons from my dad is of juniper berries and how they were used to flavor gin.
We heard the stories so often that we stopped listening. Then, after Mom died, I realized that parent lost equals information lost. I debated writing it down, getting some history major at the local college to write it down, or tape-recording it the way he recorded his own father's farm stories (on spools of wire). The spools of recordings have since been lost. Yes, Dad's stories were still boring, repetitive, and increasingly inaccurate, but when he was gone, the stories would be as well.
Dad's stories, well some of them, can push all my buttons while I run screaming up the walls. But something happens when I turn on the camera. The act of recording changes both of us. Dad turns into a performer and I become some kind of journalist: asking questions, prompting, editing.
The saddest thing for me is that Dad is the last of my immediate family. My sister died six years before my mother went. There is no one else. When Dad goes, so goes the memory of my birth. One of the few times I went home was for my birthday. Mom would tell the story of Dad being in and out and the nurses asking her if Dad ran a floating crap game. Dad talked about leaving my sister with a neighbor who got all excited and started exclaiming, "Ohhh, we're gonna have a baby! We're gonna have a baby!" Somewhere in there is also a story about my sister going out wandering in the woods and stepping in a yellow jacket's nest and winding up in the hospital at the same time as our mother. Dad continues to this day to marvel at how tiny I was and adds that I was all paid for. He even found the receipt from the hospital one day. I can't tell you how heartwarming it is for a member of our tribe to have a paid-in-full receipt for their birth. But soon he will not be able to vouch for my erstwhile smallness or my debt-free character. I will be so very, very, very sad. But I will have the video.